The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published in 1886. It’s a novella i.e. very short, just 60 pages in the Oxford University Press edition.

Reams have been written about the notion of the Double in Stevenson’s fiction. It’s easy to associate it with ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, serialised just four years later, and claim there was a Victorian fascination with the dark underbelly of their world (and particularly of London, where both novels are set). Maybe. Though remember that Gray was heavily criticised on its magazine publication, so much so that Wilde had to tone down the book version.

Best bit

For my money the early chapters (some only a few pages long) suffer from the same shortcomings as the New Arabian Nights i.e. a lack of detail and a lack of narrative drive. The horror is told but not really described. It feels loose, until the genuinely scary letter left by the dead Dr Lanyon describes witnessing Jekyll’s transformation – and then the whole thing is pulled together by Jekyll’s harrowing written confession. This last section could have stood on its own, frankly, and would have been one of the most powerful short stories in the canon.

Style

The style is much tauter than the New Arabian nights. Tighter, each phrase packing meaning.

‘The scud had banked over the moon, and it was now quite dark. The wind, which only broke in puffs and draughts into that deep well of building, tossed the light of the candle to and fro about their steps, until they came into the shelter of the theatre, where they sat down silently to wait. London hummed solemnly all around; but nearer at hand, the stillness was only broken by the sounds of a footfall moving to and fro along the cabinet floor.’

Dream

Apparently the inspiration for the story came to Stevenson in a dream. He wrote a draft and showed it to his wife who said it’s more an allegory than a story. So he burned that version and rewrote the whole thing from scratch in six days. Impressive.

London

Like the New Arabian Nights, the setting is London, London, London. Not by accident but as a pre-requisite, London being the biggest city in the world, one which struck all visitors as so vast that a man could be anonymous, have multiple identities, seek out strange adventures, get away with murder.

Freud

Freud was 20 when this was published. Unlikely he ever knew about it. He was led to his ‘discoveries’ by the persistence of patients with compulsive, neurotic or hysterical symptoms which appeared to be the result of conflict and suppression. Ie the ‘civilised’ part of the mind trying to suppress or control damage done to, early memories of, or lusts arising from, the more ‘primitive’, base personality. I was struck that the scientist Jekyll speculates that there are more than just two sides to a personality.

This is more in line with Freud – with his tripartite system of id, ego and superego – but also with modern neuroscience which suggests the mind is a congeries of interlocking systems. Either way it undermines the simplistic ‘Doubles’ debate.

‘With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.’

Darwin and science

In the OUP introduction it explains how Darwin’s works (On The Origin of Species 1859, The Descent of Man 1870) had led to a widespread cultural anxiety about the possible degeneration of humanity to a baser state i.e. there is no Providence guiding human affairs inexorably upwards. There is no necessary reason why Evolution should work in what we puny mortals consider a more moral direction.

For me the interesting aspect of Jekyll isn’t the religious one – the anxiety of the Scottish Calvinist tradition going back through Hogg and beyond etc; it’s the connection it makes between scientific experimentation and degeneration. Rather than linking back to a Scottish religious past, for me Jekyll links forward to a science fiction future. HG Wells and his anxiety that science could unleash the Beast, for example, The Island of Dr Moreau, 1896.

Adaptations

There are umpteen movie versions. The 1941 one stars Spencer Tracy and gives him Ingrid Bergman as a completely factitious love interest.

Related link

• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde online

Related reviews

• Robert Louis Stevenson reviews
• Fiction of the 1890s
• Freud reviews